What Do We Want? Peace !

"A raucous and colorful multitude of protesters, led by some of the aging
activists of the past.." is how the Washington Post described the January
27th rally and march to end the war in Iraq.

The Post went on to quote a number of people who seemed neither
raucous nor very colorful, Vietnam and Iraq War veterans, enlisted
men and women, students, and a soldier's wife who said she was sick
of all the deaths, of attending funerals.

This aging activist, never a leader, was not there. I was recovering from a
severe sinus infection, downcast because I could not go. I was there last time
when about 100,000 of us marched and called out, "No more! Stop Now!
Support our troops- bring them home!" and helped, I believe, influence the
elections that ousted some of the war's supporters.

The Post, the New York Times, and other media played the numbers game.
The phrase most used was "Tens of thousands", march organizers claimed
many more. No matter. Each person there represented many more who did
not get to DC. The tide has turned. The majority are now against the war.
Yet it goes on.

Democrats elected because of the groundswell of opinion against the war
have formulated a timid resolution with no teeth that amounts to a finger
shaking and clucks of "naughty, naughty, mustn't do." They need to be
reminded that they will be up for election again and that voters have a
long memory.

And we may not be "raucous and colorful", but neither will we be silent.
International Answer, one of the organizers of the January 27 march and
rally, responded to President Bush's speech about sending more troops to
Iraq: "Unwilling to accept the failure of his war of aggression in Iraq, his 'war
of choice', Bush announced tonight a plan that will succeed only in sending
thousands of Iraqis and U.S. soldiers to their graves in the next year."
The tower of empty shoes at the January rally was a powerful reminder of
the death and destruction wrought in this senseless war.

There will be a Global Day of Action on March 17th, a March on the
Pentagon, followed by local actions on March 19th and 20th, the fourth
anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

The war in Iraq has now cost almost $363 billion.
See what it has cost you and your community.

Amazing Grace

It was the old story: she followed us home.
I was walking with Buster, the only dog left after Ginger, the beautiful red
setter, was stolen, when the dog came trotting from a parking lot as if she
had been expecting us.

I started advertising under "Lost and Found", contacted the local veterinarian
to see if she'd been a patient there. I didn't want to keep her. Gil did.

"You need her when you go off walking by yourself," he said, "She would
protect you."

People were afraid of her, all right. The garage worker wouldn't get out
when he returned our car. "I don't go around pit bulls," he said.

Pit bull? When I asked the vet later, she said, "There's a little pit bull in her."

And varying amounts of other breeds: large, muscular, mastiff-type body,
bull dog or bloodhound drooping jowls, flopped-down ears. She was
brown and white. Part of her nose, the insides of her ears, and the pads
on her huge feet were a delicate pink.

She was neither the most beautiful nor the brightest dog in the world. She
had the habit of jumping up on me, feet planted against my chest, jaws
drooling in her joy to see me, while I staggered to keep my balance. She
weighed about 80 pounds. She turned over the garbage can and scattered
the contents and, when I refused to let her in the house, contending it would
be like trying to live with an elephant, she began digging around the
foundation. I believe she thought that if she could dig under it, she would
come up inside the house.

I kept trying to find her owner, advertising, posting signs. I didn't want her,
but she wouldn't leave. I believed someone would eventually claim her, for
she appeared to be healthy and well-fed, not your typical stray. In the
meantime, I needed to call her something besides hey, you, dog!

I had been engaged in conversations with a preacher and his mother who
had started an antique store in Alabama. At one point the preacher told
me that even though I wasn't religious, he said: "I believe you have
grace."

I was pondering this idea when I looked at the dog. "Even though you
are big and ugly and people are afraid of you,' I told her, "Maybe you
have grace," and when she leapt up exuberantly and tried to reach my
shoulders, I said, "And I know you need some grace."

So the name stuck. We called her Grace.

She had been there about a week when Gil and I decided to take the dogs
to Moon Creek, about ten miles away in Alabama. It was a hot afternoon
and they could go in the water, which was always ice cold, and run
around in the woods above the creek.

This was the place where I had seen a whole corridor of trillium blooming
back in the spring, but this was August and hot. We waded a bit and cooled
off, then ambled around looking for cattails and watching the schools of
minnows, startling frogs that plopped and splashed, then dove to the bottom
to bury in the sand. .

When we were ready to go, only Buster followed us to the van. We walked
up the hill to the edge of the woods, whistling and calling. From the hill, we
could see much of the creek and the area around it, but Grace was not there.

I was walking along the edge of the woods calling loudly, "Grace! Grace!"
And I turned to look back down at the creek, still calling: "Grace! Grace!"
just yelling out a final "Grace!" when I saw them. A group of people
clustered at the edge of the creek. Some wore white robes. All the faces
were turned upward toward me. I stood there, feeling my face grow hot.
It seemed like a long time before one of the men detached from the group
and waded out into the creek, fully clothed. He was followed by a woman
wearing a robe.

I hurried back to where Gil was. "We better leave," I told him, "They're
having a baptizing down the creek."

That night I slept out in my van, preferring a cool breeze to air
conditioning. Before I went to sleep, I told myself: "I didn't want
that big ugly dog anyway." But during the night I roused, feeling
anxious, remembering the dog, and knew I would have to go look
for her in the morning.

When the morning sun struck the window at my head, Gil was sitting
beside me. "The dog came back," he said, "She's here."

Ten miles, and surely she had never rode from our house to that
creek before. Grace never left our yard again except to go with me.

Remembering Dr. King

Chicago, Chicago, that racist town.
Chicago, where some of the whites who seemed horrified when Black
protesters were met with dogs and fire hoses in the South joined
rioting white mobs when Blacks tried to move into their neighborhoods.

Officially, Chicago schools were integrated. Actually, because children
went to neighborhood schools, Black schools were overcrowded, many
operating on double shifts, while hundreds of classrooms in white schools
stood empty. Civil Rights leaders and neighborhood organizers led protests
against the inadequate education of Black children all through the early 1960's,
demanding reform of the school system, the ouster of Chicago School
Superintendent Benjamin Willis and the trailer classrooms he'd ordered used
for the Black schools, calling the trailers "Willis Wagons".

But the schools would not be integrated until the neighborhoods were
integrated. Blacks were penned up in the large ghettos on the south and
west sides, and kept there through the collusion of real estate agents,
landlords, and the Chicago City Government which was run by the
Democratic Machine with Mayor Richard J. Daley at the helm. The slum
housing in the ghettos was profitable. Apartments were carved up and rents
doubled. With building inspectors paid off, buildings need not be maintained,
but could be milked until they collapsed or burned.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., announced the campaign for open housing in
Chicago when he spoke to a crowd of about 50,000 at a 1966 rally at
Soldier's Field, then he led thousands of us to City Hall where he posted
a list of demands to the door, an action reminiscent of that of an earlier
Martin Luther. I remember the little Black school children racing along
the sidewalks and threading through the marchers in the streets, and the
songs we sang as we marched: "Go tell Mayor Daley, we shall not be
moved.."

Dr. King and some of his aides had moved into a slum apartment on the
West Side to call attention to the shameful living conditions of the majority
of Chicago Blacks. Daley continued to proclaim there was no segregation
in Chicago, that the "minorities" lived where they lived because they wanted
to, but building inspectors, who usually winked at violations while accepting
payoffs, cracked down on the owner of the building Dr. King occupied, and
repairs began on that building.

Dick Gregory, who had been involved in some of the protests against Willis
and school segregation, led small daily marches all that summer after the big
rally and march to City Hall. I was working part-time. My children were with
their father. Three or four days a week I would hop on a bus or el after calling
someone to learn where to go that day.

Gregory was performing in San Francisco, flying back home every night to his
family, then out to walk with us every day. While we assembled, waiting a few
minutes for stragglers, he told us jokes. We were getting free what patrons of
the hungry i had to pay to hear. I only remember something about one joke; it
had to do with aliens coming to earth, seeing people putting gas hose nozzles
into their cars and believing that must be the way earthlings had sex.

After the jokes, we would start walking, sometimes 30 or 40 of us, sometimes
as many as 75, always on the sidewalks, for we had no permit for use of the
streets. There were always two or three nuns in their black habits near the
head of the march and some white men from protestant churches, but most of
the marchers on the days I went were Black. One older man carried one child
and led another, grandchildren he watched while his daughter worked. By the
end of the day, several others would have taken turns carrying the small
children. We carried signs and sang freedom songs, threading our way through
all-white northside neighborhoods or walking around in the Loop, stopping
traffic when we streamed across the streets when the light turned green, but
intent on staying together, we continued to walk across after it turned red.

There were always some of "Chicago's finest" along, sometimes accompanying
us on their motorcycles, or keeping pace on the sidewalk across the street from
us. Plainclothesmen, members of Chicago's infamous Red Squad, or Police
Intelligence, shadowed us, parking nearby, then driving past to park just ahead
of us.

One day, when the police were especially harassing, Gregory moved quickly
down the line of marchers handing out quarters. Then he led the way into a
subway station. We rode for a few blocks, then resumed peacefully walking
the sidewalks with no policemen herding us along.

I wasn't along the day they marched through Mayor Daley's neighborhood,
Bridgeport. We never knew to where we would march, only the place we
would meet, so that was not what kept me away. Daley's white neighbors,
many of whom were on the city payroll, threw eggs and stones. Like Daley,
most were Catholic, but that did not keep them from splattering a priest with
eggs and saliva. I was told later about the song Daley's neighbors sang:
Oh, I'd love to be an Alabama trooper,
That is what I'd really like to be,
For if I were an Alabama trooper,
I could shoot a nigger legally.

I had to be told about what happened. Reporters did not report the mob
action, there were no scenes of angry folks in Bridgeport on the evening
news.

There was more violence when Dr. King led us, a much larger group than
had daily followed Dick Gregory, into the all-white working-class community
of Gage Park. Dr. King was hit in the head by a rock. Crowds of jeering
whites called insults and threw more stones and bottles. Policemen held them
back and the marchers stayed together while we walked out.

Later that year I needed to find another apartment, but was having no luck.
I would grab the daily paper and turn to the classifieds, but every place
I called I was told the apartment had been rented.

I was making another futile call from work when my co-worker at the desk
behind me overheard.

"Let me try," she said, holding out her hand for the ad. She was given
an appointment to look at the apartment that I had been told was no longer
available.

"It's your southern accent," she said. "They think you're Black." She was
Jewish.

Shortly after Dr. King was assassinated and the Black riot-rebellions that
followed, Congress passed a watered-down version of an open housing bill
that it had been sitting on for a long time. And the Chicago City Council
voted to name a street Martin Luther King, Jr., Drive.

But the Chicago Democratic Machine and the real estate interests- the two
intertwined and overlapping and sharing power- won on the final count.
Federal money was used for massive "urban renewal" programs that
demolished affordable apartments and gentrified neighborhoods where
only a few Black professionals and no white working-class folks could live.

When I was in Chicago two years ago, Cabrini-Green, that notorious
vertical ghetto, had been reduced to rubble. There had been rumors for
years about how real estate interests coveted the land just west of the
Loop for rich suburbanites who wanted to move back into the city.

There are Plans to tear down all 53 housing projects, displacing some
40,000 people, mostly Black, by 2009. The condominium craze that
began more than 30 years ago resulted in many of the affordable
apartments formerly occupied by working-class families being
converted into expensive housing that was for sale, not for rent.

Townhouses selling for $500,000 to $700,000 have been erected near
Cabrini-Green, with plans to build more. A few units with subsidized rents
(and with formidable requirements and restrictions for [potential renters)
were built, but not enough to house the thousands of displaced families.
Some reports indicate that many have migrated to other segregated areas,
to neighborhoods that are 90 percent or more Black. Nobody seems to
know how or where the rest are going to live.

What Are They Trying to Say?

I was passing Walmart's Vision Center when I stopped short and
looked again at their sign. And stood there laughing.

Fastened to the top of the sign at the entrance was a smaller,
computer-generated sign that read in large black letters "Outside
Perscriptions Accepted".

A woman at a desk just inside the alcove looked up and said anxiously,
"May I help you?"

"Yes," I called, for I was some distance from her, "you can learn to spell."

She looked taken aback. "Why, what's spelled wrong?"

I should have thought of a snappy reply such as: "Come over here and
give yourself a vision test," but I didn't.

"Prescriptions," I said, still talking loudly so she could hear me,
"Oh, how I wish I had my camera."

By then another woman and a man had come from the back to see what
was going on. I walked away to get the milk for which I'd come, still
laughing. I was imagining a chart for testing vision that read: "How
Minnie Dawgs Can You See," for I knew the issue was not just spelling
but a matter of pronunciation.

For example, the so-called joke that surfaces every Christmas about the
man from the North traveling through a small Southern town. He stops at
a Nativity Scene, complete with mother and child, Joseph, donkeys,
sheep, and, standing off to one side, three men dressed in fire fighters'
uniforms, one holding a fire hose.

"Wait a minute," he says to himself, Mary and Joseph and three firemen?"

Unable to contain his curiosity, he goes into a diner and orders a cup of
coffee so he can query the waitress.

She fixes him with a disapproving gaze. "You Yankees don't never read the
Bible," she snaps.

"Yes," the Northern man says, "Yes, I've read the Bible, but I've never
read anything in it about firemen."

"Well read it again," she says, "The Bible plainly states that those three
men came from afar."

And so it was with the Vision Center personnel. The employee who made
the sign spelled prescription the way she had heard it pronounced, and the
way she undoubtedly pronounced it herself.

It isn't just words, but whole phrases that remind me that southern speech
is a different language, just as the American language is different from
that of the English. In writing, the southerner has to continually translate
in order to communicate.

A woman commenting on an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article wrote: "If
they would of looked after her.."

She has always heard "would've" as "would of", and to take care of someone
is to "look after" the person. Shopping carts are called "buggies", the clerks
behind the cash register will call out to a customer, "I'll gitchee over here!"
Which makes me think of witches and Halloween, but at least they are
cheerful. I still remember the surly, unwilling clerks in New York when I was
there one winter, but in all charity I remind myself that attempting to survive in
that city on the minimum wage would put anyone in a bad temper.

I frequently had to interpret for Gil after we moved to North Georgia. Once
I went with him to get the lawn mower repaired.

"How long did you leave it set up?" the repairman asked him.

Gil just stood there.

"He means," I said, "How long has it been since you used the machine?"

I'm reminded of a German friend who tried to explain to us the difference
between High German, the official language of the country, and Low
German. He tried to get Gil and I to move to Germany.

"But what would I do there," I asked.

"You could teach English," he said, and yes, he was serious.

But the other friends around us weren't. They were laughing.

"I can just see it," one said, "scores of Germans speaking English with a
Southern accent."

The Atlanta Beauty

The giant panda cub at the Atlanta Zoo was named Mei Lan, which means
Atlanta Beauty. Following Chinese custom, her naming ceremony was held
when she was 100 days old, with representatives from China attending.

The cub weighed only about a pound at birth on September 6th last year,
but was up to 13.9 pounds by December 28th and measured 28.9 inches
from her nose to the tip of her tail. And she looks like a Panda now, in
contrast to her almost hairless, rat-like appearance at birth. Her efforts at
earning to walk and other activities can be watched on the Panda Cam
between 10 a.m. and 5p.m. est.

Mei Lan and her parents, Yang Yang and Lun Lun, are at the zoo on a
$10 million loan agreement with China. The zoo is to pay $1 million per
year for 10 years and is supposed to make a one-time $600,000 payment
for each cub born in their facilities, including Mei Lan, who is to be sent to
China when she is about two years old. Funds from the lease payments by
Atlanta and other zoos are used by China for conservation and educational
programs about the Pandas as an endangered species.

Officials of Zoo Atlanta are reported to have found their expectations of
greatly increased attendance because of the pandas disappointingly
unrealized. It seems likely that more would attend if the Zoo would lower
their admission rate- currently $17.99 for "adults" (those 12 and over),
$13.99 for "seniors", college students, and members of the military, and
$12.99 for children aged 3- 11. In order to do so they might need to not
spend millions renting animals that are adequately protected in their homeland.
Zoos all over the U.S. have been steadily pricing themselves into luxuries over
the years. The Chicago Zoo used to be free. The last time I was there, I had
to pay $12 just to park in their parking lot one afternoon. At least the Atlanta
Zoo has free parking.

The Giant Panda has long been a symbol of peace in China.

Beautiful Fungi

Three years ago a tree fell across the creek, making a natural
footbridge. The cat that prowls along the banks came across it
sometimes, and the gray crane that visits here perched on it.

For three years it stayed alive, as if it were the most natural
thing in the world for a tree to grow horizontally. Every spring
new leaves covered its branches, and every fall they turned brown
and fell away.














Then, during the drought last summer, it began to die. On the
upper trunk, concealed by the leaves to the right in the first
photo, three large fungi sprang up. One day they were just there.














The largest fungus is about a foot in diameter. It looks like a
serving bowl, perhaps a bowl for fruit.

I will be mourning the death of this tree. There aren't enough years
left for me to grow another that large.